Friendly Fire: Cold War 2.0 Claims First American Casualties

Donald Trump’s trade war with China kicks off and the Pentagon’s dream of refighting and rewinning the Cold War, this time with the People’s Republic of China instead of the USSR, is one step closer to reality. But be careful what you dream for. This might be the war we don’t win.

The collateral damage in Cold War 2.0: American consumers and businesses. They are expected to suck up a few tens of billions of dollars in increased costs so that the United States can take another step in “deChinafying’ the American economy.

Scorched earth economics: what’s in it for you? Other than higher prices, I mean.

Also, have you ever wondered “If China’s so great, why doesn’t it fix Haiti?” Well, guess what. China has does have a plan to fix Haiti…The deal is real and so is US opposition. When US China hawking and PRC economic diplomacy collide, no surprise that the little guy in the middle is the one who gets hurt.

And how Barack Obama destroyed the world. Yes, it’s true.

Barack Obama pursued his liberal dreams while Hillary Clinton chased her China-bashing ambitions…while the world burned.

Perhaps no foreign affairs issue in recent history has been so thoroughly misunderstood as the backstory of U.S. engagement with North Korea. That’s because U.S. machinations relating to North Korea are about as dirty, unsuccessful, and embarrassing as can be imagined.

Here’s your chance to understand the context of U.S.—North Korea relations: a trio of special reports I have prepared on the untold story of U.S. duplicity and failure on North Korea. Unknown, that is, to Western observers who rely on the selective historical memories of American policy makers and pundits; but deeply known and felt reality to North Korean and Chinese policymakers for whom U.S. bad faith and betrayal is the default setting in Korean affairs.

John Bolton’s presence on the White House staff is a red flag to Chinese and North Korean policymakers. That’s because John Bolton’s core competency is sabotaging the stated and perhaps genuine intentions of the President of the United States to pursue peace on the Korean Peninsula, and substitute “active measures” to promote regime change.

One of the most consequential failures in modern U.S. diplomacy (or anti-diplomacy) if you prefer, was a disastrous foray into financial secondary sanctions targeting North Korea during the George W. Bush years when John Bolton ruled the North Korea regime-change roost. The sanctions gambit—targeting a tiny, China affiliated bank in Macau—backfired and literally birthed North Korea’s first atomic bomb.

It’s history that the Chinese and North Koreans know deep in their bones, even as the U.S. government tried to deny and ignore the reality of the fiasco. To understand the deep distrust and reflexive caution of Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping in dealing with the United States, you need to know about the Banco Delta Asia gambit of 2005.

This is a non-paywalled China Watch offering posted on the Newsbud youtube channel per the link. Please circulate it among your friends and encourage them to subscribe to Newsbud and get the full story of America’s North Korea boondoggle.

My Asia Brief audio report on the history Americans don’t know… but drives current events on the Korean peninsula. Resentment at the sacrifice of Korea to U.S. Cold War ambitions and the Japanese alliance runs deep…and Koreans in the North and South are finally able to do something about it.

The Korean War was a desperate and dubious battle in which the US was ready to try anything and everything to overcome its strategic and tactical disadvantages. Biological weapons, nuclear weapons…and Douglas MacArthur’s plans for a strategic breakout via escalation of the Korean conflict to a regional war. Everything was on the table.

Douglas MacArthur made the first US attempt to parlay a Korean crisis into an existential confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. With the US milsec establishment, his ideas are more popular—and dangerous—than ever. My documentary uses first hand testimony and declassified archives to finally reveal the truth behind this long-suppressed event.

This site depends….

Comments

There were a few points in this episode that should invite welcome civil discourse. Thank you, Peter! That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

So, let me be the first to jump into the cold pool of face melting global warming.

I hate pollution. That was my response, appropriately 30 years ago, when my theoretical geophysicist brother-in-law, who has an impressive resume (gets hired with immediate tenure at universities, worked for both gov, such as NASA, Hanford Site, and now at DOE, as well as private industry), was discussing the letter he had sent to the Academy of Sciences, pointing out a flaw in their global warming measurement technique (I was 16 and don’t remember what exactly, but he was disturbed). But, there are so many other negative outcomes of human caused pollution, such as the orange skies in LA, the warnings in so many polluted areas not to go outside, and the effects on health and the environment from those toxins released.

By the time I was in my late 20’s, around the turn of the century, I couldn’t believe one of my friends didnt accept that global warming was “Settled Science ” (* This is an important propaganda term, that is also a contradiction in terms, as I realized later.)

That’s how it was, until, in my early 40’s, um recently, when I started realizing that the lies about geopolitics, which I thankfully had been able to validate through my exposure to a petite little ass-kicking woman of steel, and her court battles with the FBI, her organization of whistleblowers, and 3 generations of news and analysis platforms, were not the extent of the gaslighting we had been subjected to, even though they are much deeper and worse than most can consider.

Science. Relativity. Gravity. Electricity.

Science was the realm of natural philosophers, who were burned at the stake for challenging religion. That is, until the age of enlightenment. But, I realized that something had occurred a century ago, which put religion and gaslighting back into place, in the control grid in which we find ourselves.

Big Bang Cosmology.

Now, I’m starting to understand the frustration of my brotherbrother-in-law. He got no response from the Academy. It just remained a sliver that he continues to live with, having worked hard and been successful in the structure he was entrenched in.

Sorry for the long introduction, but I wanted to give my personal context, to make the point that convictions are emergent and that there’s something very unsettling about the term Settled Science.

After your face is done melting and your eyes and ears are firmly in place again (find an airconditioned movie theater with comfortable seats – bring earplugs and a blindfold) , I’d recommend the following hour-long documentary and the online resources provided below.

There’s a reason why mathematicians are winning all the prizes these days. It’s a language (barrier), not a natural science. Here, we have the Martin Luthers of Science, with much to tell, in common language, using math when appropriate, but putting it back into the support role, instead of leading the forced indoctrination back into the dark ages of faith and belief (trust us), with irrational bandaid after irrational bandaid after new lab after Nobel prize:

Thunderbolts Project – Space News Playlist (on YouTube)- If you like to think – its knowledge made available in English, without hiding behind the math language barrier, though it addresses mathematics. This is the place that flipped me after a couple years. Not esoteric or woo woo. Multidisciplinary scientists with integrity. Very interesting and might flip you too, if you’re not careful. )
YT/playlist?list=PLwOAYhBuU3UeYFyfm2LilZldjJd48t6IY

Safire Project (multi-million $ plasma physics lab in Toronto, creating a star in a jar, so to speak – getting 6k + °C temps with 180 watts, and plasma layering similar to layers of sun – very awesome to see):
YT/user/scirustech

Thanks for your consideration. I realize this is a lot. Let’s start with the source of that face melting heat and the radiation from something bigger than an X-ray machine at the dentist or the airport scanner, or even the terrifying 5G. Dun-dun-duuun!

Two dollar T shirts for people with minimum wage jobs, versus $3 T shirts for industrial workers making industrial wages. The latter wins.

Going to the dentist costs money and sometimes involves pain, too.
Not going to the dentist has worse consequences.

The best method would be intervening against the USD, driving it down 20 or 30 pct until the trade deficit goes away, and there’s re-industrialization.

That’s basically what was done in the Plaza accord in 1985.

A more important discussion would be on making US workers aware that they are in competition with low wage workers and automation, meaning they need to be competent reliable workers with lower wages than used to exist prior to globalization..

The future of the US is dependent on its re-industrialization, scientific, technical, and industrial proficiency. That should be obvious to any competent person, and if Trump shakes up the status quo in furtherance of that – more power to him.

From the consumer perspective, Walmart. Cheap crap with unregulated materials, which can be toxic. And that’s just iPhones. Think of all the unnecessary problems associated with saving a dollar on x, flocking to the poisoned well for some chicken feed.

From the smaller business perspective, what smaller business? Walmart.

Also, instead of thrift shopping at actual thrift stores, we can go to overstock outlets and dollar stores, for “new” stuff. If you know someone skilled at thrift store shopping, you recognize the benefits of better quality products and more re-use of like new or long lasting household items and clothes. My mom has found some real gems for me, such as solid oak desks, high quality clothes and shoes, etc. These things are being sent to the landfills, since we can now get sweat shop crap with name brands.

I won’t lie, I’ve done it as well. I’ve tried to regularly take my children to “Sally Anne’s ” as my mom calls it (Salvation Army Family Store), and let them pick a couple toys, while I check the furniture. But, the appeal of “new” stuff has taken over many times.

I remember when consignment shops were more common, as well as neighborhood groceries. But, Walmart. (I actually refused to go there for many years. ) We forget what the China trade policy allowed them to do to neighborhoods and small towns.

But, as Peter pointed out, it’s not just China. (And it’s not just Walmart or iPhones.)

That said, there is something symbolic in the disruption happening, even if Trump is just feeding us a line of faux populism. The “Buy American” bumper stickers, which disappeared in the 90’s might start reappearing, because the symbolism is bigger than whatever Trump’s motives might or might not be.

I voted for “non-viable” candidates since 1996, because a big part of the goal was to get the issues on the table and spread awareness. I noticed that the mockingbird media really only had to do about 5% of the work, to fuel the least-worse fear voting. The rest was done by all the people who wanted the non-viable candidates, but would do all the whipping, to make sure their peers were in line, with the “grown-up and realistic” voting strategy that got worse every cycle. I was accosted at work for wearing the wrong button, many times, until they realized I wasn’t a viable parrot.

So, against my supposed philosophical origins, and with substantial foresight that I would not appreciate having a reality TV douchebag as president, I was very conflicted when I voted for Trump. For me, it wasn’t least worse, although I was well aware of the Clinton mafia, it was the fact that he brought the issue to the National Stage, on live TV. “You’d be in jail.” Yes, they were friends behind the scenes, but the concept of real accountability at the highest levels was lit, and hopefully bigger than Trump.

So, whatever the specific unviable details of this tariff war, and my personal agreement with stories about the collusion of the alleged enemies, such as Sibel’s latest expose on the underhanded deal to affect regime change in Iran, I have to say that the disruption is productive, at least if we can take advantage of it.

I have mixed feelings about all of this, but I agree with your general statements about slowing down the consumption of cheap crap, by needing to pay that extra dollar. And that the desire to make product’s in the USA is bigger than Trump.

Whether or not we compete with automation might be a question of for how long. Once were making things again, the innovation coming from the ground up might just re-emerge. Having work really suck and being poorly compensated aren’t necessarily permanent. Tools can be used for good or bad and there’s no reason why we need to be stuck in the paradigm of completely manual nefficiency. The problem is that many think we can only avoid dirty jobs by making sure others do it.

Thanks for getting me rambling again. I hope more people will join in.

I’m not sure if I will vote again. But, I hope I’ve been consistent in my strategy so far. It’s been difficult to reconcile and I’ll never stop trying to validate what I’m thinking.

Really grateful for Newsbud, including the Community, precisely for this reason. Thanks again, R A.

There are very good reasons to doubt the AGW hypothesis, not the least of which being that CO2 levels lag behind increased temperatures (Temperature increases cause an increase in CO2, not the other way around).